I spent today fighting every system they built to wear you down.
The patent office. The IRS. The state of Kentucky. The post office. Every one of them a wall with no door marked clearly. Every one of them designed — and I mean designed — to make you feel stupid, slow, and small until you give up and walk away.
I have seen this before. I spent time in the military. I know what a bureaucratic runaround looks like when it is being run on purpose. You learn it fast when the system holding you is the one that owns your time, your paycheck, and your next assignment. You learn the difference between a system that is broken and a system that is working exactly as intended. Broken systems want to fix themselves. Intentional ones just add another form.
This one beats the cake.
They are not confused. The systems are not broken. They work exactly the way they were built to work. Confuse the language. Hide the instructions. Change the form. Send you to the wrong address. Make you feel like the problem is you. Make you apologize for not understanding what they never explained. Make you start over so many times that starting over feels like failure instead of persistence.
It is not you.
I am seventy-one years old and I fought every one of those walls today and I am still here. USPTO. IRS. State of Kentucky. USPS. Each one a different language. Each one a different door with the handle on the inside. Each one counting on me to decide the effort was not worth it and go sit down somewhere quiet.
I did not sit down.
I found every handle on every door they hid from me and I opened it. Not because I am special. Because I have been here before and I know the game now. The game is exhaustion. The game is confusion. The game is making the mountain look higher than it is until you stop climbing.
That is what they are counting on you not to see.
The people running this right now — and you know who they are — they did not stumble into this strategy. They chose it. They are turning up the heat because they know what happens when ordinary people stop feeling confused and start feeling clear. They know what a population looks like when it stops blaming itself and starts reading the room.
They have seen it before too. And it scares them.
So they build the walls higher. They hide the handles better. They make the forms longer and the phone trees deeper and the instructions more circular until you are so tired you forget what you were fighting for in the first place.
Do not forget.
I am telling you what I saw today because you need to hear it from someone who lived it today. Not in theory. Not in history. Today. April 4, 2026. One ordinary man at a keyboard fighting one system after another and finding his way through every single one of them.
The design is deliberate. The exhaustion is the point. The runaround is the weapon.
And the answer is the same one it has always been.
You do not quit. You find the handle. You open the door. And you tell the next person where it is so they do not have to find it alone.
That is what we do here. That is what we have always done. And that is exactly what they are afraid we will keep doing.
They are right to be afraid.
“A Working AI Firewall Framework”
“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack
Unauthorized commercial use prohibited. © 2026 The Faust Baseline LLC
